


Black Blood From Blacker Hearts

by Zoom Zoom (PaperLillyWebs)



Category: Grand Theft Auto V, Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Grand Theft Auto Setting, FAHC, Fake AH Crew, Gavin's babbling, M/M, Meet Ugly?, Pre-Fake AH Crew, action movie sniper stunts because this isn't really what a sniper would do, but it's gta so, but they're good for each other, for vagrant because why the fuck not, gay slurs, gta v - Freeform, michael is pan shh, minor cliche antagonists, no whump...?, sniper gav, they're not good people, this is their fault anyways, tw: setting-typical homophobia, young gay boys in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 10:31:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20740778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaperLillyWebs/pseuds/Zoom%20Zoom
Summary: “Whisper a dangerous secret to someone you care about. Now they have the power to destroy you, but they won’t. This is what love is.”Or, Michael meets Gavin before he ever meets the others. They deserve a small bit of softness, in a city like theirs.





	Black Blood From Blacker Hearts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vagrant_Blvrd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vagrant_Blvrd/gifts).

> for vagrant. i hope you like this one too /)'3'(\
> 
> *quote is from the Night Vale twitter, ca. 2013
> 
> DISCLAIMER: This RPF fic follows Achievement Hunter's fanfiction guidelines to the best of my knowledge and is in no way intended to reflect the real people. These characters are fictitious, based on their GTA personas, and any inspiration taken from their lives has been given careful consideration.

They only meet because Michael is paranoid. Because he can't  _ not _ keep checking every door and window in the bank as if his piece of shit boss is paying him to, because he doesn't trust his crew as far as he can throw them, and he trusts Los Santos even less. 

Michael is twenty-one and born-and-bred of The Saints, the filth of the city inked into him deeper than his father's blood, and he's new to his crew and to the scene, but he knows what a sniper rifle looks like, perfectly framed by the sun.

So he ducks. Glass rains over his head and his crew drops around him, blood on marble, and gold spilling through broken windows. Another crack of the rifle, and the man worth little more than the ink to write his checks splatters the floor right by Michael's boots. The bank manager goes down with a bloody gurgle. 

Hostages are screaming, running for cover, police sirens wailing in the distance. But Michael looks up, out the broken glass to the building across the street. The barrel of a rifle looks back, the blur of a figure behind it, but they don't fire, just watch Michael with the sort of interest that gets him into trouble.

And the rifle lowers, disappears with the shadow until Michael is crouched among the bodies he should have joined, wondering what the hell this means for him now. 

  
He has a reputation before he truly understands the consequences of such a thing. News outlets tote his survival of the worst bank heist in San Andreas history as some sort of miracle, and milk the story for weeks. Michael is twenty-one with a ledger as bloody as his knuckles, and he has the worst of his city tripping over themselves to hire him. He salutes at empty windows before pushing into banks, these days, and nobody ever salutes back.

All crews ever want him for are bank jobs, like having him there is some sort of lucky charm, that if Mogar runs the intimidation, they all make it out alive. And Michael is fine with that, he gets to beat people up for a premium, and no one ever fucks with him for fear his first crew’s ruin will become theirs. 

It finds him in downtown quit a lot, until he knows the streets better than his own neighborhood. He knows all the alleys, and which buildings have a sub-level entrance, what days they get their money orders. And he learns all the sniper roosts, just in case. 

He doesn’t join crews anymore, can’t be bothered to, and can afford to pick his jobs with more care, only ever work for those that will further his career. His name isn’t Michael to the carrion that hire him, it’s Jones, it’s Mogar, it’s Knuckleduster.  _ Michael _ is for the dark of his apartment, and for Kerry, the only one who’s known him long enough to remember him that way.

Michael is twenty-two and pushing into a bank behind a crew with no name, when he salutes at the building across the street, and a previously-empty window salutes him back. 

He freezes on the threshold, and his boss is already inside, probably already threatening the poor bank teller, but Michael is one foot in the door and glaring down a rifle that almost seems to grin back, contraband hollowpoints where teeth should be. 

He doesn’t know quite what the sniper is trying to tell him, when they wave their rifle away from the bank a few times, but Michael is still twenty-two, with no plans to paint the sidewalk for a long while yet. So he puts both feet out the door and walks away. 

Watching the news that night, Michael starts to wonder about this “luck” of his. The station anchors dance around the subject of the shoot-out, but he’s learned to read between the lines: a big crew from the South has its eyes on Los Santos, and they aren’t afraid of making a bloodbath of a Fells Wargo to knock out the competition. And in a line of work where wars are declared with explosions and dessicated messengers, all the drama druglords can squeeze into a single meeting, this crew’s slinking through the shadows puts just about everybody on edge. 

Not Michael, not yet. He’s too young, too fucking stupid, too caught up in the addrenaline to back out now. He doesn’t go to ground the way every instinct in him screams to; he throws himself into his work and ignores the sideways glances his bosses send him, the whispers that he’s a scout for this Southern crew that no one seems to know the name of. It doesn’t stop people from hiring, so Michael lets them have their whispers. 

He does stop taking bank jobs, even simple smash and grabs, but there are always more crimes to commit in a city like his. Which is maybe why they ever meet in person at all. 

  
A bullets-for-teeth smile greets him at the first meeting for a jewelry heist, and Michael shouldn’t recognise the scruffy prick balancing his chair on two legs, but oh, he recognises that smile. 

Their boss, an old-timer that worryingly goes by the moniker Nuke, doesn’t notice shit between them, and pushes Michael the rest of the way into the warehouse. He struts to the table surrounded by other Los Santos browbeaters and launches into the plan like the only open seat isn’t the rickety chair next to the sniper, who salutes Michael with two fingers, slowly and deliberately. 

“Mornin’,” the fuck says, all gleeful like Christmas came early, and not caring at all when Michael just glares some more. 

Nuke prattles on for an hour outlining the heist, giving addresses, times, their cut — if they succeed. He stresses the importance of reconnaissance, which is more than Michael can say for other heists he's worked, before releasing the ten or so hands he’s hired for the job. Michael doesn’t get away fast enough, Scruffy And British leaping to his feet and situating his gangly limbs in Michael’s space like he belongs there. Michael’s fellow bruisers duck around them with muttered threats, but Nuke still doesn’t notice a fucking thing. 

“‘Funny meeting like this, ‘innit?” Scruffy says, watching Nuke scoop up his three different maps from the table. 

“We don’t know each other,” Michael snaps, but Scruffy doesn’t even flinch.

“‘Hardly my fault, you mof, with you running around the city too fast for me to pin down.”

Technically, they’re three-for-three, keeping Michael alive instead of offing him, but it does not settle the sudden ice in his bones. “You’ve been looking for me.”

He doesn’t deny it, sticking his hands into his pockets, and isn’t he dressed a little too nicely for clandestine meetings in the industrial district? “Aw, c’mon, Micool,” he  _ whines _ , “if I wanted you dead, you would be.”

Michael is twenty-three and knows it isn’t bluster that makes Scruffy so sure. “That’s not my name.”

“I’m Gavin,” he says like Michael hadn't spoken, holding out a hand that Michael doesn’t take. Utterly unbothered, Gavin drops the handshake but leans further into his space instead. “Jewelry heists are a little outside your usge, aren’t they?”

And Michael isn’t sure what kind of answer he’s looking for, so he does the only thing he can think of: he walks away. 

Not from the whole job, no, he has rent due at the end of the month, and this crew isn’t dead yet. 

He shows up at the warehouse shaking off a rare Los Santos downpour, none too happy to see he’s the first one there, besides Nuke and  _ Gavin _ . Nuke is at the rolling whiteboard taping up photos like a cliche, and Gavin is sat at a cardtable across the room, typing at a cruddy old laptop that’s hooked up to a pawnshop monitor. 

Michael catches himself hesitating, before forcefully reminding himself that he’s worked with  _ Heyman _ , he’s worked with  _ Tuggey _ , he’s known from Vinewood to La Puerta as the fists to hire if you want your job done right, and he isn’t going to be afraid of some British prick that may or may not have tried to shoot him before, and then didn’t. Shoot him, he means.

He grits his teeth and tosses his duffel by the door next to the coatrack someone must have dragged in, before making his way to the cardtable. Gavin barely looks up, as Michael pulls out the spare chair and drops into it, and he can’t imagine what he could possibly be doing on the computer, unless he’s decided to fill in for whatever techie Nuke had hired. Michael sighs.

“You’re not going to try and glak me, right.” The typing stops, and Michael thinks Gavin needs to work on his poker face, in a game like theirs. “What? Legitimate question.”

“You what.”

“‘You wot’,” Michael mocks back, against his better judgement. Better judgement says don’t fuck with the guy that can shoot him from over a hundred yards away, but the way this kid flaps his lips like a fish has Michael doubting if he really is the same man  _ (boy) _ that had him in his crosshairs more than once. 

“Glak.”

“Yeah, y’know.” He mimes a gun firing with his fingers. “Shoot me. Do I have to watch my back for this?”

He leans over to close Gavin's mouth for him, and Gavin blinks before squinting at him. “I already said it, didn’t I? If I wanted you dead, you would be.”

Michael meets his eye squarely, searches through his expression for the usual signs of aggression, of the sort of rage people like Michael carry with them, and he turns up... empty. He sees a curious kid looking back at him, with a childlike wonder that hasn’t been dented by the sorts of things his hands have done. An ease, perhaps, that maybe he doesn’t get the satisfaction from it all that Michael does, that maybe it’s something to  _ do _ , to stave off the curiosity. 

And Michael is more terrified of that than if he had seen the furor their city tends to wrought, but then, something also settles within him. He had no more reason to fear Gavin rinsing him than he did the other schmucks he works with, and something about the  _ If _ of all this, the  _ If I wanted you dead _ , puts a blind little bit of faith in him, that if he ever did something deserving of Gavin’s aim, Gavin would let him know he’s coming.

So, turns out, Gavin is Nuke’s fucking hacker, the prick doesn’t even carry a sidearm, and not a single fuck they work with knows how good he is behind a gun. 

Michael has never been one to cozy up to his crewmates, so he watches from the sidelines as every bruiser, every thief, every grifter that passes through the warehouse size Gavin up. They see his stupid button-ups like he’s commuting from Vinewood every day, see his wiry frame and the way he smiles at everything, and Michael watches them all come to the same conclusion: that Gavin is a well-off nerd trying to make an easy buck, with nothing but soft skin when you roll him over. 

He watches them all make a pass at Gavin, trying to get a rise, and oh, Gavin sure plays along. He spins words into gold that drip from crooked teeth, voice just the right side of squeaky to sink into that squishy techie persona he seems to be after. Michael watches him somehow manage not to roll over completely, but still convince their crew he’s a pushover. Nuke’s main gun, a brute named Angelo, is always at Gavin’s cardtable, making crude jokes and threats in hopes that, someday, Gavin will fight back properly. Gavin feins horror, disgust, reacts exactly like people expect a priss like him to.

And Michael is  _ furious. _ Your name is everything, in what they do. Without some sort of stamp on a job, claiming that you did it, what the fuck are people going to hire you for? All of Gavin’s foolish bravado tells Michael he’s exactly the type to flaunt his prowess (and Michael will be the first to hate to admit it, but anyone that can take out a twelve-man crew with a single rifle from across the street  _ has _ prowess). But he blinks all bambi-eyed and  _ soft _ until Angelo or the others turn their back, and only then does his expression drop back to cold calculation. 

Then Michael starts to wonder if those bank hits ever had anything to do with that Southern crew.

Michael usually sits close to the door with nothing to do, his part doesn't come until the actual heist, but, one morning, he arrives before anybody else. He’s careful, when he needs to be, and for some reason, his brain doesn’t tell him to be careful, just then. 

So he sits at the cardtable.

Gavin freezes in the doorway an hour later, a slow grin pulling his lips into something far too sincere for Michael's liking. Gavin trips over himself as he sits and pulls out his laptop, and only smiles wider at Michael's scoff. 

Angelo makes it all the way to the table before realising his favourite plaything has company, and Michael would pay  _ big fucking bucks _ to have taken a photo of the exact second Angelo decides he can’t take Mogar on. Michael gives him a blank little smile, relishes in the way Angelo seethes under the surface, but, a coward through and through, won’t make a scene in front of Nuke.

After the first few days of Michael lounging next to Gavin, Angelo gives up. Pussy. He plays cards across the room with the other guns and acts like he isn't sending sour looks to them every ten minutes, like a pussy. 

Michael catches Gavin smiling at him, the first day Angelo avoids the table completely, expression a touch bewildered, but so fucking open that Michael wants to slap the look off his face.

“What?” he snaps, pulling a map towards himself.

Gavin just grins and scoots in his chair, ducking back to his laptop. “Nothin’,” he says, completely unhelpfully, and Michael glares at him until Nuke calls them for the daily meeting. 

  
“What happens when an astronaut ends up upside down?”

Michael jerks awake from his light snooze, reorienting himself in the dingy, sweltering dark of the warehouse. He blinks at the light from the shitty floor lamp next to them, and the rest of the place is dark except Nuke across the room, at his little desk and pouring over the plans like he does, every second of the day. It’s T-minus two weeks now, and even Angelo has taken to sleeping in the warehouse; even brought his own cot.

And, stretching, Michael thinks he should do the same, because the folding chairs he’s been sitting in for the past month are  _ garbage _ . But bringing a cot, or even a sleeping bag, would be giving Angelo the satisfaction, and Michael is twenty-three and a stubborn fucking idiot.

Then he registers what Gavin’s said.

He stares at his tablemate, wondering if one of the thieves had hotboxed the warehouse. “Fucking what.”

“Y’know,” Gavin waves his hands vaguely, his chair tipped back like it had been, that first meeting, and he isn’t even pretending to work now, is he. “Like, in space. What do they do when they think they’re upside down?”

“You're a fucking moron.”

“No, like when they're space walking, there's no gravity, right? But inertia and ear fluids and stuff, astronauts can tell when they're upside down, right? What do they do?”

“Gavin. Fuck off.”

Gavin does not, in fact, fuck off, and instead launches into the complicated science of inner ear fluids, and do space suits have inertial dampners? What do they do if they have an ear infection? Michael stares and wonders just what the fuck Gavin had seen in him to think he gives half a shit about anything that's coming out of his mouth. 

And fuck him, Michael has always been stupid for the carelessly earnest, for when someone's eyes light up. He's a fucking morosexual, isn't he? Oh god, he's twenty-three with a  _ crush, _ on a man talking about jellyfish in space _ . _ Because he's gay for people that could kill him but probably won't get around to it because they're so fucking  _ stupid _ . 

Michael leans onto the table and puts his head in his hands, while Gavin keeps babbling, and did you know NASA has been launching jellyfish into space for decades? Micool, did you know that?

“Please just shoot me,” he says into his palms.

“Why would I do that?” Gavin starts typing again, the clack of keys filling the tension between them. “You're so much more fun alive.”

Michael groans. 

  
The unmade mattress in his cruddy apartment does little to ease his suffering, as he lies awake and scowls at the stains on the ceiling. He can count the number of conversations he’s had with Gavin on one hand, but here he is at three in the morning: pining _ . _ Like a high schooler.

Michael has dated before, has been  _ in love  _ before, and he knows that whatever this is, it isn’t that, but it doesn’t make it  _ better _ . What sort of business would he have, falling in love, when he makes other people bleed for a living. 

He’s been fighting since he was a kid, has never really known anything else. His foster family was good to him, never laid hands on him the way all the horror stories went, but they were poor as dicks, and everybody knew it. Michael was smaller than most, and he had to learn to defend himself pretty quick, but then he never learned how to fucking _ stop _ . He was fourteen when he first beat someone into the pavement so hard they didn’t get back up. He still doesn’t know if they ever did. 

Instead of kicking him out, his foster mom sat him down with a boxer from Boston and told him to control it. Dooley was a good man, more than Michael ever deserved, and taught him to fight properly, the good way, the safe way. Michael was eighteen when Dooley fell off the face of the earth, and he just hopes he didn’t end up dead in the alleys Los Santos is known for.

Back then, the streets and rings knew him as Dooley’s Boy, but when Michael killed his first brawler at nineteen, it didn’t feel right to keep his name. Dooley always tried to stop him before he got too far, but Michael had never been very good at listening, had he. 

When he joined his first crew, three days after his twenty-first birthday, he broke up with his then-girlfriend, and hadn’t looked back. People in Los Santos don’t get happy endings, people like Michael even less so. ‘Split too many skulls to get that white picket fence. 

Until now, Michael has been able to pin back every emotion except his rage, likes to think himself professional enough to keep it that way, but as his little analogue clock ticks past four, he knows he’s fucked. 

  
Michael doesn’t run, never fucking learned how, so he sits with Gavin again the next morning, and tries not to let his breath sutter at the pleased grin Gavin shoots him. 

“Micool!”

“That’s not my name,” he sighs, picking up the closest file to flip through it lazily. 

“You go back home last night? Even Nuke slept over.” Gavin turns back to his keyboard, but Michael doesn’t miss the way he’s leant towards him now, a subconscious act of comfort that Michael will be reading too much into for the next week. Fuck him. 

He wants to be angry, angry is easy, but it isn’t exactly Gavin’s fault that Michael can’t keep his heart in his chest. “‘Had to meet someone,” he lies, resigned, and pretends to read the file. 

Gavin wibbles in his chair, gaze suspiciously blank. “Got a bird back home?”

“Yeah, a cockatoo named Polly.”

Gavin squawks, and something fucking  _ soft _ makes a home behind Michael’s sternum. “I meant a girlfriend, you knob!”

“I know what you meant.” Michael glares over the top of the folder. “Your fault for assuming it’d be a girl.”

He wants to be buried alive. Choking on dirt and worms would be better than the triumphant glint to Gavin’s eyes, then. Why doesn’t he just get “Fucking Queer” tattooed on his forehead? Walk around in Pan pride colours until everybody in his rotten city knew he swung every way he could swing his fist?

Gavin takes it into stride better than he certainly could have, grinning to himself and saying, “You’re right, my bad for being heteronormative.”

  
Michael does consider running, then, when Gavin all but latches onto him and talks his ear off with all the earnest of a puppy that had finally been told  _ yes _ . Their crew doesn’t comment openly, but the looks they get are enough to make Michael’s skin crawl, because it doesn’t matter if they think they’re sleeping together or whatever else, it matters that they will take this knowledge, of how close they are, and hide it until they end up on opposite sides, and then use it to tear them down. Mogar doesn’t have weak spots, walks the streets with the confidence of someone with nobody to lose; it’s vital for him to keep the illusion that not even Kerry matters to him. 

So the calculating glares tossed in his direction, the sideways looks when Gavin’s back is turned has those soft feelings turning to barbs in his chest. 

T-minus one week, now, when Michael shows up at the warehouse to tell Nuke he’s out, to find another bruiser. At first, he thinks the entire crew has cleared out for the day, at the lack of cars in the little lot outside, but he does hear voices, and resigns himself to at least another day dodging Gavin’s wiggling eyebrows.

Inside, Michael doesn’t know what to make of what he sees. Gavin, next to his computers, and Angelo, holding him up by the front of his shirt until his stupid converse barely touch the ground. 

Angelo is too focussed on Gavin’s pathetic struggling to notice Michael enter, faces pressed close enough that he’s sure Gavin is getting a wonderful view of Angelo’s dental hygiene practices.

“... gonna do, type me to death?” Angelo says like a fucking cliche, all sleaze and vainglory, as Gavin snarls back,

“Nuke’s gonna have your ass,” and it occurs to Michael that snipers —and hackers, for that matter— are rarely any good at hand-to-hand. Goddamnit.

“He’ll have to find your body for that. You think you can just strut around like you own the place, you fag? Just because Nuke knows your boss?”

Gavin scoffs, somehow not looking frightened at all. “Nuke  _ is _ my boss, you mong.”

“Don’t pretend half of Los Santos doesn’t know you bend over for those fags down south. Do they even pay you, or just pass you around?”

“I’m starting to think this isn’t about me, but your internalised homophobia. Daddy keep you in the closet growing up?”

With a snarl, Angelo drops him to grab him by the throat instead, eliciting a squeak that turns Michael’s stomach over. “Are you fucking stupid or what?! Prince Charming isn’t around to save your skin today, you faggot. You both think you’re so slick, did you think we couldn’t  _ smell _ it on you?”

Well, they’re both fucked now anyways, aren’t they? 

Michael sighs, throws his career out the window and moves across the room. Puts a hand on Angelo’s shoulder and waits for him to turn to deck him right in the teeth.

Gavin stumbles away until he lands on his ass, only gasping a little bit, but Michael is preoccupied with Angelo reorienting himself and registering just what he’d done. He wonders if Nuke had the forethought to hire thugs as good with their hands as their guns, but the way Angelo yells and takes a wild swing tells Michael everything he needs to know.

He drops his weight back and easily dodges, doesn’t have to think about the second blow he lands to Angelo’s jaw. He’s smaller, sure, but Michael’s made a living on downing those bigger than him in two hits, and if Angelo takes one more, well, all the more fun for him, right?

Angelo reaches for the holster at his side, but Michael doesn’t let him get that far, hooking up his elbow and nailing him right in the temple. Angelo crumbles like the cards he covets, and hits the ground. Hard.

Michael looks down at his body, not even winded, and sighs. He steels his heart before looking to Gavin, but even that doesn’t prepare him for the bewildered  _ warmth _ that looks back. 

“What,” he snaps, because he’s been in love before, sure, but he's never learned to say it. 

There’s a gruff laugh behind them, Michael spinning around to find Nuke and a couple of the thieves stood just inside the door, all looking amused. Nuke is hiding a smile behind a tattooed fist, looking far too pleased for someone who’s found in-fighting among his crew, seven days before a heist. 

And oh fuck, Nuke is going to shoot them, isn’t he? Michael at least. Gavin hadn’t actually done anything, he supposes, as his gaze darts around the thieves for anyone going after their guns. 

“I won’t pretend to be happy I’m down a man,” Nuke says, coming the rest of the way into the room and crouching to inspect Angelo’s prone form, “but I can’t say I don’t appreciate keeping my hacker in working order. Hagen would have my ass if anything happened to him.” He straightens to clap Michael on the shoulder, and Michael wonders if he’d even woken up that morning. 

He doesn’t know who Hagen is, almost doesn’t care to know, but Gavin is back to scoffing indifference, dropping from his elbows to his back. “‘Hagan’,” he says, with air-quotes, “would appreciate if you stopped calling him that.”

“Tell him he needs a new codename out West, then,” Nuke retorts immediately. “Since he won’t let me use his real one.”

“Noted.” Gavin heaves a sigh, and cocks his head against the filthy floor to smile at Michael. “Thanks, boi.”

Michael just wants to go back to bed. 

  
Of course, as some sort of punishment, Nuke has Michael filling Angelo’s role as well as his own, which is all well and good, except it means twice the time spent with Gavin, who has gone from annoying to completely unbearable. All up in Michael’s space like he’d been invited to, and doesn’t shut up even under pain of death. 

And while Nuke was all too happy to cut Angelo off, send him on his way without regrets, he must still harbor some sort of annoyance for Michael, because he teams him up with Gavin on recon for three days straight. 

Gavin in the warehouse had been tolerable: at least there, there were other people Michael could relocate to when Gavin’s hypotheticals got to be a little too much, but here, Michael is stuck in a subway maintenance booth under the store they’re heisting, with a scant three feet between him and the hacker that seems determined to babble him out of his stupid crush. 

“If they've got such big brains,” Gavin is saying, sat on the floor with a black box full of wires in his lap, while he does something incredibly clever to the cable hanging from the ceiling, “why don’t they know not to beach themselves?”

Michael rubs between his brows and leans against the doorjamb. He’s just here for lookout, he shouldn’t have to  _ deal _ with this, but then, yeah, why didn’t dolphins know not to beach themselves?

He shakes himself. “I don’t know, Gav, why don’t you know I’m three seconds from shooting you?”

With a scoff, Gavin smiles cheekily up at him, and then strips a wire with his teeth. “If you wanted me dead, you’d have offed me weeks ago,” he says, with all the confidence of a drunkard. And Michael only hates him because he knows he’s right, and knows that Michael knows. “How much time do we have?” Gavin asks.

He sighs, but shakes his sleeve up to check his watch. “Three minutes and fourty seconds. How close are you?”

“Two minutes, at most,” he says, around a mouthful of pliers. The gross orange light above their heads doesn’t do Gavin’s face any favours, but Michael finds himself resigned to the fact that he doesn’t  _ care _ , is stupidly enamored by the way Gavin hasn’t cut his hair since the job started, so that his bangs hang into his eyes. 

Michael resists the urge to brush them back, and returns to watching the hall.

  
They walk home that night, neither too far from the jewelry store, but Michael isn’t quite sure why they walk  _ together _ , why Gavin fucking trots along at his side and hums whatever pop song had been playing in the bar they’d just passed. Safehouses are sacred space, rarely shared even among crews, and until now, Gavin had respected this, even with his disregard for personal space. Michael doesn’t know what to make of him walking him home like this.

They stop at the cross street two blocks from his apartment, and Gavin is still fucking smiling. 

“Well, I’m this way,” Michael says, doesn’t give away too much, and Gavin’s smile only slips a little. 

He takes half a step away, but hesitates. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

It’s early, the sun barely going down, and Nuke expects them at the warehouse at seven tomorrow for final prep, but Gavin isn’t making any move to leave.

Michael clenches his jaw and sighs harshly. “Fucking— Christ, fine, c’mon.” He turns away and doesn’t have to wait for Gavin to follow.

  
Gavin stays over that night, lets Michael wrap him up in skin and sheets, and then stays again, the next night. Sleeps with his head under Michael’s spare pillow like a fucking moron, but Michael is just so fucking  _ fond,  _ and settles himself as close to the British prick as the Los Santos heat will allow.

Michael makes them breakfast, egg burritos and frozen hashbrowns, and Gavin sits at his breakfast table, babbles on about everything and nothing at all. 

“But nobody’s  _ seen _ one, right?” he says, as if Michael has responded even once since they’d sat down. He watches Gavin finally notice he has a piece of egg in his beard, and hides a smile behind a sip of coffee. “‘Bit entitled saying they don’t exist, innit?”

“Sure, Gav.”

Gavin squints at him. “Are you having my ass?”

“No, I’m having a coffee,” he says, deadpan, and laughs when Gavin throws his spoon at him. 

They finish the job with Nuke with as little trouble as Michael could have hoped, and he half expects Gavin to leave, to go back to being shadows in windows outside banks. But the night they all walk away with their take, Gavin walks away back to Michael's. And Michael lets him. 

“People like us don’t get this,” he says quietly, later, when they’ve sleepily ended up in his bed, with Gavin wrapped around him like a particularly-clingy lichen. 

Gavin grunts, somehow still comfortable with Michael fully laying on one of his arms. “Wha’do you mean?” he slurs, sounding half asleep already. 

Michael looks down at him, the streetlight outside cutting stripes of yellow over Gavin’s back through the blinds. He reaches down to twist his fingers into Gavin’s shirt, which he belatedly realises is one of his own, and watches the way the light bends around his fist. “We aren’t even naked right now,” he says. 

Gavin raises his head from Michael’s sternum to squint at him, just so fucking  _ Gavin _ that it almost pains him. “Are you spaced, boi?”

“Please speak American English for once in your life.”

He pitches down his voice and fakes a horrible Southern accent. “Are ye high, Mich-ale?”

Michael can’t help but laugh, kicking him under the blankets. “Shut up, you prick, I’m being serious.”

“Do you  _ want _ us to be naked?”

It’s a sobering thought that, no, Michael doesn’t want Gavin naked, he wants the both of them, just like this. He sighs. “That’s the problem, isn’t it.”

Gavin scoots up the bed, expression thoughtful as he frees his arm to run both hands through Michael’s curls, all soft and slow like Michael hasn’t had multiple people’s blood right where he strokes his fingers.

“We’re not good people, Gavin,” he says, just as soft.

“No,” he agrees, letting a ringlet bounce back into place over his temple. “‘Doesn’t mean we can’t have good things.”

“And am I? A good thing for you?”

Gavin sighs, but smiles all the while, with the heels of his palms framing his face. “Stop worrying, you mong. I’ve kept you alive this long, haven’t I?”

And Michael supposes he has.

  
Michael is twenty-four and too far gone for the British idiot that moves in with him by sheer force of will. He wakes up one day to computer parts all over his floor, a rifle propped against the coat closet, Gavin’s stupid energy drinks in his fridge, and by then, it's too late. 

Michael pays for the groceries, and Gavin covers the electricity. They share the rent, and neither do the dishes, and it’s not like Michael needed all that extra room in his double bed anyway. 

He still beats people up for a living, Gavin still shoots people sometimes, destroys lives with his computer others, and maybe too much of their budget is spent on bullets and bandages, but no matter where their jobs take them, Michael always makes them dinner, and Gavin always patches up his knuckles. 

They don’t call themselves anything, they don’t take the risk, in a city like theirs. But when Gavin launches unprompted into a story about his hometown, his best friend that got him into the business of trading lives for paper, Michael knows they’re in deep. They’re twenty-five, and Michael learns Gavin still talks to his crew down South, but hasn’t taken a job from them in years. That his middle name is David. That the only reason he didn’t shoot Michael, that first day in that first bank, was because he saw his glasses and felt  _ sorry _ for him.

And maybe Gavin learns some things too, that Michael’s childhood home was torn down to build a strip club, and that he never finished high school. He takes him to meet Kerry one night, at a seedy bar that knows their drinks but doesn’t ask their names. 

Gavin is off taking a piss when Kerry sidehugs him, baffled but pleased. “It’s good to see you happy,” he says quietly.

And Michael supposes he is.

**Author's Note:**

> This is not even close to the story I intended to write, so I'll save that plot for the future. Have this instead?


End file.
